IDEAS & TRENDS; Setting the Standards For Literary Masterpieces (Published 1988) (2024)

GREAT books are lately a matter of politics.

Prof. Allan Bloom, author of ''The Closing of the American Mind,'' and Secretary of Education William Bennett, among others, say that the books to be taught are mostly Western and mostly pre-modern, the books that have informed the literate for centuries. An array of critics say that this orthodoxy discounts the non-Western, the nonmale and much else worth knowing. And many of no particular school are simply trying to refine the allocation of finite time among infinite voices.

To some university administrators, the question is what to put on the reading lists of basic humanities courses. To scholars, the question is how we shape -and interpret - the literary canon, that body of anointed works that, for better or worse, form the common currency of a liberal education.

Several scholars and critics addressed the subject in a colloquium last month at Princeton University. In the session, sponsored by the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism, most disputed the Bennett-Bloom view. Excerpts from some of the presentations follow. IT WAS RACINE, SO IT WAS GREAT

The notion of the masterpiece has several meanings. It is an outstanding achievement of one particular artist or writer. It is a work that for some reason we think deserves reverence or expects to be revered in a particular cultural tradition, as literature that would be a shame not to read or to have read. And it lays claim to universality and is thereby a lesson in humanity.

Of course, however, we all know that the notion of the masterpiece is very problematic.

I remember, for instance, how, when I studied Racine in a French lycee, we were given a passage by Racine to explicate, and we were supposed to demonstrate somehow that it was indeed a passage from Racine. And that since Racine was great, it was obviously a great text that we were reading. Or, in other words, Racine was great because he was part of the great French cultural tradition and the French cultural tradition was great because it counted Racine among its writers.

But the notion of the masterpiece is problematic for reasons that are independent of this kind of French cultural hegemony. It is problematic aesthetically because of shifts in tastes and in social realities; historically because works are determined by historical moments but also determine them; ideologically because literature creates and weaves ideologies but is in turn determined and woven by them, and politically because it can serve as an instrument of cultural assertiveness, even repressing other voices.